Archdiocese of Newark to close 8 more parochial schools

Robert Sciarrino/The Star-LedgerParents and children leave the Mater Dei Academy at the end of the day. The academy is one of eight elementary schools that the Archdiocese of Newark will close at the end of the academic year.

The community of Mater Dei Academy in Kearny had already survived one Catholic school crisis. In 2009, the Archdiocese of Newark merged the local school, St. Stephen’s, with Holy Cross School in Harrison, creating the newly named Mater Dei Academy and housing it in St. Stephen’s facility on Midland Avenue.

Now the Mater Dei community is facing round two. The archdiocese has announced the three-year-old school will be shut down in June.

"It’s heartbreaking," Nicole Mobus of East Newark said as she waited outside the school with her daughter Breann, who graduated last year, for her four other children, enrolled in first, fifth, sixth and eighth grades. "The kids need this school. They get a lot of one-on-one attention. It’s a family."

Mater Dei Academy is one of eight schools the Archdiocese of Newark will close because of declining enrollments and fragile finances. One, the nationally ranked basketball powerhouse St. Patrick’s in Elizabeth, is a high school. The others are elementary schools: St. Leo/Sacred Heart Interparochial School in Irvington, Queen of Angels in Newark, St. John School in Orange, St. Anne School in Jersey City, and Hillside Catholic Academy in Hillside.

The archdiocese will also close grades 1 through 8 of Assumption Academy in Emerson and will reopen that school as early childhood center for three-year-old pre-kindergarten through kindergarten, archdiocesan officials said.

As enrollments continue to decline, the archdiocese has closed down dozens of Catholic schools over the past several years.

Last year, two were shut down and five in 2010. After June 30, the archdiocese will operate 112 schools, including 81 elementary schools for 31,087 students, according to the archdiocese’s spokesman James Goodness. Ten years ago, there were 176 schools (139 elementary, 37 high) with total enrollment of 52,603.

The Diocese of Paterson said it has no plans to close schools this spring, while the Diocese of Metuchen says it will close St. Cecelia’s School in Iselin at the end of the school year.

Robert Sciarrino/The Star-Ledger View of Hillside Catholic Academy which is one of the seven elementary schools that will be closed down by the The Archdiocese of Newark at the end of the year.

Mater Dei families said yesterday they feel the archdiocese did not give them fair warning about their school. They were told enrollment for next year hadn’t met the goals, and fundraising wasn’t strong enough, but both efforts are still unfolding, said Carri Primavera of Kearny, who has children in the first and fifth grades.

"We’re still enrolling, so how can we miss the goal?" she asked. "We’re crying."

When Mater Dei opened three years ago, it had 250 students, the archdiocese said. This year it has 170.

"It’s heartbreaking for the kids," said Jose Munoz of Bloomfield, whose two daughters attend the school. "All their friends are here. All will go in different directions."

Newark Archdiocese’s Vicar of Education and Superintendent of Schools the Rev. Msgr. Kevin Hanbury acknowledged the difficult situation but said the archdiocese could not afford to continue to subsidize the schools, and he said he feared parents couldn’t afford the tuition increases required to achieve self-sufficiency.

"It tears my heart out," Hanbury said. "No one wants to see their backyard school cease to function. My heart goes out to all these folks who have stayed with these schools. They kept staying with hope, with hope, with hope."

The archdiocese says it provided between $100,000 and $200,000 to help the schools cover the costs of books, electricity and heart and teacher salaries. In addition to financial trouble, the eight schools suffered sharp declines in student enrollments. St. Patrick’s enrollment for its middle school academy and high school was 151 this year, down from 180 last year and 262 in 2008. Assumption Academy’s K-8 enrollment fell to 137 this year, down from 157 last year and 171 in 2008, the archdiocese reported.

Hanbury said the archdiocese has learned that parents looking to enroll their children want schools with 300 or more students. "There is security in those numbers," he said.

Hillside Catholic Academy, created by merging several schools in 2006, only lost six students last year, bringing its total enrollment to 159 students, according to the archdiocese. But that number is a sharp drop from its peak of 256 in 2006.

Parents yesterday expressed their anger at the closing of Hillside and three other area schools.

"If this school closes, and all the others ones in the area close, where am I going to put them? I don’t want my kids in public schools," said Yvonne Holmes, a Newark resident who pays for her granddaughter to attend fourth grade.

Hillside’s home and school association is lobbying the archdiocese, saying it will pay as much as a $1,000 a year more for each student to keep the school operating. So far, 65 to 70 parents have signed a promissory note, said Demesha Herron, the association’s executive director.

"We knows it’s numbers and figures to the archdioceses — and I understand that — but it’s emotional for us," she said.